Ghost
by Dryad Mage
Summary: After the MRD releases sentinels to harass and exterminate mutants, Isabelle Landstom finds herself suddenly on the run. She gets help from the X-Men, but coming from a wealthy family, she's offended some powerful people by revealing herself as a mutant. She finds herself in more danger than ever before.


"Isabelle, get down here!"

"I'm coming! Be patient!" I shouted, finishing putting my earrings on. I was standing in the hallway before the gigantic mirror we have there, wearing clothes I knew my mother would disapprove of. In her eyes a leather jacket, a black t-shirt with a smiley on it, and all sorts of bracelets, rings, and fingerless gloves automatically pushed a person into one of those strange slacker punk people. The fact that I have bright blue hair doesn't really help matters, but as far as she's concerned I've 'dyed' my hair ever since I was a little girl.

I finished putting the earrings in, and admired the affect. They were cheap earrings. I only paid five dollars for them, and I got them from one of those chain clothing stores that really had no business selling earrings at all.

Yet I got more compliments on them than I usually did on my expensive earrings.

At another insistent call from my mother, I turned around and sped down the stairs. She was waiting in the foyer, her perfectly manicured fingers perched on her slim waist, which was covered by a satin shirt and a fur wrap. My mother was the wife of the CEO and she liked flaunting it.

Of course, I had nice things in my closet and we'd gotten my prom gown from a very high end wedding store, but I didn't try and flaunt it the way my mother did.

As I predicted, her mouth set in a hard line at the first sight of me, and she lifted one of her hands to tap disapprovingly on the mahogany side table right next to her.

"What have I told you about dressing like that?" she asked, her face carefully emotionless. I wondered if she had a botox appointment today. She'd had enough that it was getting hard to read her no matter what emotion she had.

"It doesn't matter, Mother," I said, fighting the urge to roll my eyes. "We're going to the mall, not to Vera Wang."

"That doesn't matter," said my mother. "We're the Landstrom's. People _expect_ us to behave a certain way, and dressing like a hooligan isn't nearly what that should be at all."

"I'm also in college, Mom," I said.

My goodness, this sounds very close to the argument we had when they thought I dyed my hair blue. Father relented after a half an hour of Mom and I shouted at each other. He said that most people wouldn't care if I got a tattoo on my hand, so why should we bother about hair? Of course, I believe that was a plea bargain on my father's part because I was only thirteen at the time.

Neither of them, however, would've liked to hear the truth.

"Look, I'll run up real quick and put on Great Grandmother Mary's necklace," I said, gesturing to my bedroom upstairs. I had a nice walk in closet with a vanity inside, and her necklace was sitting in my jewelry box right on top of it. "Will that be fine?"

A quiet sniff informed me that no, it wasn't fine, but she would settle with that for now. I bolted upstairs and ran in. In a way, adding Mary's necklace would only add to the rocker vibe that I had going on. It was completely the opposite of what I was wearing, with it's quiet elegant string of pearls that supported a porcelain portrait of my great grandmother's own grandmother. I loved that thing with all of my heart. Most of the time I dressed softly, elegantly, in a manner that my mother approved of. Not because she didn't harangue me when I dressed like that, but because I enjoyed it. I felt feminine and powerful.

But on occasion, like tonight, I had to dress like a rebel.

I returned to my mother without another word spoken. She smiled softly but her eyes shot daggers at me. She didn't go back on her bargain, however, and we walked through the garage door to where my father waited with the large SUV. It was just after Thanksgiving and we were going Christmas shopping. Not for presents, but for a few ornaments to add to our tree.

My father simply lifted an eyebrow at me, but he didn't say a word as I slipped into the back seat and my mother into the passenger one. He pushed a button, the garage door lifted with a hum, and we drove out into the night.

There was nobody outside. Late at night our neighborhood always looked as if nobody lived in it but were just a large area of perfectly kept dollhouses always on display for people to see. There were a couple of houses that already had their Christmas lights up, but they didn't have them turned on, as a principle. The entire neighborhood waited until at least the tenth of December for everyone else to get them up so we could all light them up at once and put on a grand display for people who liked to tour the homes of the wealthy.

After I 'dyed' my hair blue, all of the neighbors lifted up their nose at me. They didn't stop associating with my mother, but I noticed a difference in the amount of people who visited by our house. See, the high society people my mother thrived amongst hated any symbol or sign that any of them or their children could possibly be a mutant. Most parents in the neighborhood absolutely refused to let their children dress up for Halloween, and if any of the kids played Dungeons and Dragons the most they let their kids bring down was a foam sword. No fake elf ears or colored contacts.

And they assumed, rightly, that I was not normal. One morning not long after I turned thirteen, I woke up with a bright blue streak in my hair. I panicked, because I knew what it meant. Even though I hadn't manifested any special powers, the simple sign of that streak meant that I was a mutant. I snuck out of the house early that morning, leaving a text for my mother to receive telling her that I went to an early morning choir practice. My friends didn't bat an eye at the new color—they simply accepted my explanation that I'd dyed it with no qualms—but I made sure to hang out for an hour or two before I returned home.

There was that big argument, which I won thanks to my father, but every morning I woke up there was less and less brown hair and more and more blue. I stayed those extra couple of hours every day, and made sure to withdraw an appropriate amount of money every day so they wouldn't get suspicious of all of my dye jobs with no dip in my bank account.

My stache of books grew exponentially during that week. I didn't lack for reading material for a _month._

I discovered my ability about two years later. Me and a couple of my friends were hanging out in the tree in my backyard one evening, laughing about a couple of the guys at school and drooling over Jared Leto from 30 Seconds to Mars. One moment I was sitting on a thick branch about six feet up from the ground, and the next I found myself falling to the ground. I shrieked a little bit, but right before my face would've plowed into the mulch, I stopped. I was simply hovering there in a prone position. Both of my friends gave little screams as well, but it wasn't until I lowered myself down that I saw why.

I was transparent.

What you could see of me was all in a monotone blue, but I could peer through my hand at the mulch and grass around me. When I heard my mother's voice coming from the living room the shock turned me back to normal. She never found anything amiss, and I never said anything to her.

Both of my friends stopped talking to me, but at least they were polite enough not to spread word of my mutant status to the rest of the high school population. I wasn't terribly popular to begin with, thanks to my blue hair, but being labeled a 'mutie' would've sent me to a status that meant I was below dirt, and word would have certainly reached my parents.

It wasn't until I got to college that I found any real friends. My roommate was nice. She didn't bother asking any questions about how my roots never started showing, nor did she seem to care. We left each other alone. It was a writers group that I ended up joining that provided the real friends. Two of them were mutants themselves—I went to a fairly liberal college that didn't care if people were gay, straight, mutant, or even extra-terrestrial, but the latter was really never worried about, as the most foreign our exchange students got was Russian.

At least if my secret was ever 'outed', I at least had a place to stay. Mom and Dad would definitely kick me out.

The car pulled up to the mall without any mishaps on the way there. There were a ton of cars still in the parking lot, and I swear I saw an old couple making out in the backseat like a pair of hormonal teenagers. I couldn't quite decide if it was adorable or gross.

A few groups of people were making their way in, and as soon as my father cut the engine I was unbuckling my seat belt, eager to get in the door and shopping for those few ornaments. One of my favorite authors just came out with the last book in their awesome series, and I wanted to get back to it as soon as possible. When my mother first brought up the idea of leaving, she explicitly told me that I was to leave my horrendous fiction at home. You can imagine what she said when I told her I was going to be a creative writing major.

Horrendous nouns occurred that summer after I graduated high school.

As my heels touched the pavement, the cool air rushed in and caressed my face. I sighed, happily. I actually loved the winter, and was glad to see it returning. I was going to return to school for a few more weeks after tonight, and I was hoping to see snow hit the ground before I headed home. Southern Louisiana doesn't exactly provide a white Christmas.

A thump rattled the ground.

"Oh, look," said Mother, pointing off toward the stars.

"What?" I asked, turning around.

"Sentinels," she said, and I was really glad she was not watching me as my face went pale.

Off in the distance there was a couple of lights moving, hovering above the horizon. It was probably about a thousand feet away, standing in the darkness, but the lights of its eyes were too high for it to possibly be a car, and there was no mistaking the purple metal beneath the orange shine of the street lights.

"I thought they weren't sending them out for a few weeks yet," I said, my jaw slack. I'd made plans with a few of my friends to take a nice winter vacation to a nice little cement bunker in the middle of nowhere.

"I guess the MRD didn't want to let the mutants have a head start after all," said my father. "Good going for them."

My heart stung.

As the lights of the machine's eyes grew larger and larger, there was no mistaking the fact that it was coming in this direction. I looked left and right, and realized that I was right in the middle of a populated parking lot. The machine would no doubt start targeting me, and where would that leave these people? At least with my powers, I had a decent chance of surviving the attack, but…

No matter what their political opinions were, I couldn't let my parents get hurt.

"Um," I said. "Perry told me that he wanted me to grab him a video game, so I'm going to go and hop on over to the store. I'll be back in time for a ride home. I got my phone if I'm not."

"Are you sure?" asked my mother, not bothering to tear her eyes away from the machine. She didn't realize that it was headed this way. Goodness, she actually looked _happy._

"Quite," I said. "See you later!"

I ran.


End file.
